Three months to deliver a transformational fundraising system

Since 2009, Care2Give has been at the forefront of fundraising in the UK, acting as the link between charities and their face-to-face fundraising efforts. In that time it has secured more than £100 million in donations for the country’s leading national and international charities.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The central planks of Care2Give’s fundraising model were the ambassadors who conduct fundraising, and the software – developed in-house – through which campaigns could be tracked. However, Care2Give’s software was inflexible, and in 2016 its fundraising partners withdrew their supply of ambassadors and moved directly into competition. Care2Give realised that to survive it urgently needed to transform its business, directly employing its own ambassadors, and improving its software platform.

PROJECT BRIEF

Red River’s technical audit confirmed that Care2Give’s existing software was an unsuitable starting point for its ultimate goal of producing a re-sellable fundraising product. As the company embarked on a period of major restructuring, Red River was tasked with designing and developing a completely new fundraising platform. Care2Give’s turnaround needed to be rapid, so the initial aim was to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) within three months.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

Red River knew that the ideal way to achieve Care2Give’s objectives would be to design the system as a product from the beginning, rather than trying to package it into one later. It designed and developed software to enable Care2Give’s transformation, which can also be licensed to other organisations working in charitable giving. It consists of a cross-platform tablet app, developed in the React Native framework, linked to a cloud application managed and presented through a customisable web interface. The system is intuitive, secures public data from the point of entry, and creates a full audit trail of the fundraising process.

RESULTS

Red River delivered the MVP for user-acceptance testing within three months, and shortly afterwards Care2Give started user training for a first wave of campaigns. The software is fully controlled and managed through an easy web interface, freeing the company from its previous reliance on coders to make routine configuration changes.

Care2Give has completed its internal restructuring, and is now reinvigorated: managing professional and ethical fundraising programmes end-to-end, with full accountability. While the realigned business has strengthened and enhanced its core proposition, its partnership with Red River has further provided it with a new revenue stream: the licensing of a fully featured, modern and secure fundraising product.

We should have come to you a year earlier!

Gavin Hockley, director, Care2Give

PROJECT TECH DECISIONS

As a fully objective, unbiased consultancy team we firmly believe that the technology should follow the need, not the other way around. We make our decisions based on the most appropriate technologies available at the time. Here's what we used on this project:

Saffron framework with CQRS model for scaleable, stateless high performance and cloud architecture

Semantic UI for efficient development of responsive pages and consistency of controls

React / Redux for designing forms and wizards and traceability for debugging